In the field of electronic document management there are many situations where a document is stored as a photographic or scanned graphic of the actual document. For example, in a litigation document management system example documents may represent evidence, reports, court orders, patent documents, etc. The graphic image of the page is critical in many cases and needs to be preserved. However, there is also a need to electronically search the document. Additionally, there has been a long felt need to be able to cut the text from a document and have an accurate internal citation, or location identification, automatically pasted into a new document (e.g. report, brief, etc.) with the text that was cut. In litigation, having analysis, reports, and arguments error free is very important and a significant amount of time spent creating quotes and internal citations and then in checking them to ensure accuracy. Moreover, some documents have a lineage over time that is represented by separate documents. This lineage may be for update or correction reasons where content is added, changed or deleted or it may be for progression reasons where the subject is moved forward. With patents, for example, a lineage may comprise subsequent patent applications which are divisions, continuations or continuations-in-part.
What is needed is a way to analyze documents in its graphic format and then be able to generate quotations with accurate internal citations. Also in patent analysis, for example, what also is needed is a way to thoroughly review all occurrences of certain terms in context to be able to thoroughly and accurately determine the meaning of those terms. Also what is needed is a way to correlate similar documents and provide multiple internal citations across those documents.